1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to piezoelectric elements, piezoelectric actuators, ink jet recording heads, ink jet printers, surface acoustic wave elements, frequency filters, oscillators, electronic circuits, thin film piezoelectric resonators, and electronic apparatuses, which have piezoelectric films.
2. Related Art
An inkjet printer is known as a printer that enables a high resolution picture quality and a high-speed printing. An inkjet printer is equipped with an ink jet recording head that has a cavity whose volume changes. Ink droplets are discharged from its nozzle while scanning the head, whereby printing is performed. As a head actuator in the ink jet recording head for such an inkjet printer, a piezoelectric element that uses a piezoelectric film, which is represented by PZT (Pb (Zr, Ti) O3), is conventionally used (see, for example, Japanese Laid-open Patent Application 2001-223404).
Moreover, because the characteristics of surface acoustic wave elements, frequency filters, oscillators, and electronic circuits are desired to be improved, excellent products with novel piezoelectric materials are expected to be supplied.
It is noted that higher picture quality and faster printing speed are in demand in inkjet printers. To meet such a demand, the technology to make nozzles in an ink jet recording head to have a higher density becomes indispensable. In order to achieve this, piezoelectric elements (head actuators) that are laminated over cavities, and in particular, the characteristics of piezoelectric films, in other words, their piezoelectric constant need to be improved.
The present invention has been made in view of the problems described above, and its object is to provide piezoelectric elements equipped with piezoelectric films having a high piezoelectric constant, and to provide                piezoelectric actuators, ink jet recording heads, ink jet printers, surface acoustic wave elements, frequency filters, oscillators, electronic circuits, thin film piezoelectric resonators, and electronic apparatuses, which use the piezoelectric films.        